Eleanor and Park

Rainbow Rowell – Actual book

I am falling behind writing about the books that I am reading.  I read pretty fast and writing about my reading takes up a longer time than I can easily carve out of the day.  The lesson here is to annotate and take notes while I am reading and to not worry too much about the content and quality of the final post.  The journey and process is the important thing.  I also just took a reading speed test on the internets and was informed that if I read an hour a day, I can read approximately 150 books in a year.  That seems a bit ambitious since I tend to be sporadic with my reading, so I will set a goal of a 100 books for the year to read and write about.  Excelsior!

Eleanor and Park was an interesting book.  I definitely liked it and enjoyed the narrative structure of switching back and forth between the characters viewpoints.  Eleanor and Park themselves are fully fleshed out but the other characters are a bit sketchy.  I guess this is acceptable when the book is literally called Eleanor and Park.  The best part of this book was the realistic depiction of the intensity of adolescent feeling and the awkwardness of the teenage brain. 

I was a teenager in the 80’s so I related to the time frame although I felt that it didn’t quite capture the feeling and zeitgeist of the mid-80’s.  There were a few things that helped set the scene, but otherwise it could have been easily set in the present day without cellphones.  I think Rowell set it in the era partly because she was familiar with it and so that the plot development could proceed without the complications of phones and social media that today’s teenagers deal with as part of their world today.

My son is also 15 and sort of introverted, so there was a lot of recognition of this reality.  This book was a good reminder that even though teenagers seem disaffected and aloof to the world, there can be a lot of intense emotion roiling beneath the surface that is not immediately apparent.  I bought this book partly in the hopes that he would read it and maybe give me a bit of feedback about how he relates to the mindset of the characters.  He did read it (when his phone was taken away for some infraction) but I haven’t poked yet to see his thoughts on the book.   

So overall I had a lot of empathy and connection with the book.  Even the fact that Park was Asian in a mostly white community felt pretty true to life, especially the fact that he didn’t internalize his attractiveness because he didn’t get any feedback from media.  His feelings as an ‘other’ definitely seemed to be part of the bod that he shared with Eleanor.  I think that this separation from society could have been explored a bit more, but that is a personal preference. Eleanor’s feelings about herself as a somewhat zaftig, poor girl who was a social outcast also felt very real.  There was a lot of poignancy  in the descriptions in her trying to deal with her life and her living situation and her inner strength really shone.  The family structures and the dynamics were nuanced and realistic, even though I felt that the characters were still a bit one-dimensional.  This may be somewhat deliberate to really focus on and emphasize the self-absorption of the teenage world but it was again a lost opportunity for depth.

I enjoyed the pacing and the deliberate way that Eleanor and Park’s relationship and growing love from their interactions on the bus was developed.  If they make a movie of this book, I hope they focus on the small moments and not rush through the blossoming of their feelings. As a narrative contrast, I enjoyed the somewhat random side story about Park wearing eye shadow to school despite opposition by his father seemed like an extension of his need to define himself rather than just a rebellious act or fashion statement.  In the same vein, I liked the aside of Eleanor’s disaffected father and her enjoying the freedom from her stifling home despite his selfishness and apathy toward her.  

It did seem a bit rushed when everything came to a head at the end of the book with the crisis of Eleanor’s stepfather potentially abusing her.  The ending did seem realistic and pragmatic and not overly contrived in a happy Hollywood ending, although I was not thrilled with the postcard ending with the mysterious three words from Eleanor to Park.  What was she going to say?  ‘ I hate you?’  ‘We can’t work?’ ‘It was nice’?  I guess if you are a teenager, the ending gives you  a reasonable level of closure because you can project your own dreams onto the situation. 

Takeaways:  Internal dialog can work as a plot driver.

You can’t go wrong describing or showing the emotional state of a character. 

The small words that flesh out a scene or a character are very important.  In my mind, a little more depth would have pushed this from a good book to a great book.